Rural and Urban Connections – Transactions and Transformations in India

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Rural and Urban Connections – Transactions and Transformations in India!

Trade, migration and remittances, the exchanges of goods, people and money are the most obvious signs of the relationship between urban and rural areas. Other influences are less tangible: standardized curricula and increased access to education; the growing reach of the mass media; commercial advertising and campaigns by service organiza­tions; the influence of cultural and religious networks, and the spread of urban services to the rural areas all increase the strength and depth of the interactions between them.

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The traditional rural family lived on and from the land which provided food, fuel, water and often clothing and shelter as well. They were secure when their hold on the land was secure, and when the land delivered what it promised. Bad landlords, bad government or bad weather meant deprivation and often famine.

For many rural families, those times have gone, for better or worse. Fertilizers, flood control and irrigation remove some of the uncertainties from farming, but the small farmer still finds it hard to survive in the cash economy. Population growth, environ­mental damage and commercial farming mean that many rural people are landless and depend on cash wages. More and more they look to the cities for a livelihood, by their own efforts or those of their children.

If they stay on the land, they look for ways to produce more and sell more. The rural areas around cities, even small cities in predominantly rural areas, offer urban markets.

Improvements in transport and the development of intermediate markets provide addi­tional opportunities. Assured sales permit increased risk, such as new and more productive technologies.

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In search of security, many farm families are diversifying their sources of income. Employment opportunities in rural areas and small towns are most often in commerce and services, which demand some education and are often open to women.

This has encouraged poor rural households to put a greater value on education, especially for girls, and on girls themselves. They may also look again at the value of children and decide in favour of investing in a higher quality of opportunity for a smaller number of children.

The effect of this diversification strategy is closer contact with urban centres and urban values. At the same time, for those who make the move to the city survival in urban areas may depend on the rural skills such as finding a small piece of land to grow food or crops for sale. Migrants will also rely on the social networks based on their places of origin, intensifying their linkages to their rural families and recreating some of their former social structures.

Remittances are an important form of exchange between urban and rural areas. Money flows in both directions but the bulk of it consists of urban migrants’ support to their families at home. Remittances can amount to as much as 50 to 80 per cent of the income of families, and is the highest in lower income families, particularly those who are otherwise dependent on farm income.

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Men earn more than women and send more to home but women are more consistent; young women, in particular, earn more than their brothers. Most women migrants send remittances and if they are in domestic work, which provides food and lodging, they send more of their cash income. For the poorer migrants, remittances can be a large proportion of their total income. Recent migrants have frequently received help with their move, and they are more likely to send money home as repayment.

Remittances are thus part of a pattern of linkages; obligations and voluntary mutual help, which help forge the links among family and community members between communities at differ­ent points on the rural-urban continuum.

The impact of remittances on recipient families in rural areas has been a subject of considerable debate, centring round the distribution of use between consumption and investment. For the poor, sending families’ remittances are part of a variegated survival strategy. They can support immediate basic consumption needs such as the improved diets; providing better health care, for example, family planning; finance improvements to housing; providing security for risk-taking, such as innovations to increase productivity; or allowing long-term investment such as annuities or education costs.